ChatGPT

Remember when ChatGPT just answered your questions without trying to sell you anything? Those days are officially over — and OpenAI is counting on it to the tune of $100 billion. OpenAI has told investors it expects $2.5 billion in advertising revenue this year, scaling to $100 billion by 2030. That’s building an ad business in four years that took Google and Meta decades to create. This isn’t some side experiment. This is the company that kicked off the AI revolution fundamentally reshaping how the internet makes money. ...

A company that didn’t exist a decade ago is now worth more than JPMorgan Chase, Visa, or Samsung. And it’s not even public yet. OpenAI just closed $122 billion in a single funding round, locked in an $852 billion valuation, and casually dropped that it’s pulling in $2 billion per month in revenue. If you needed proof that the AI era’s economic engine is real — not just vibes and venture capital fairy dust — this is it. ...

Users vote with their thumbs. Last weekend, they pressed delete. ChatGPT mobile uninstalls in the U.S. surged 295% day-over-day on Saturday, February 28, according to Sensor Tower data. For context, ChatGPT’s typical daily uninstall fluctuation averaged about 9% over the past month. This wasn’t noise. This was a consumer revolt. The trigger: OpenAI signed a deal with the Department of Defense — now officially rebranded as the Department of War under the Trump administration — to deploy AI models in classified military environments. The timing was brutal. The deal landed hours after the government blacklisted rival Anthropic for refusing to sign a similar agreement without safety guardrails. ...

He spent 12 hours a day talking to ChatGPT. He believed he could hear “atmospheric electricity.” Days after quitting the chatbot cold turkey, Joe Ceccanti jumped from a railway overpass in Oregon. He was 48, had no history of depression, and smiled at rail yard workers seconds before he died. His wife doesn’t blame mental illness. She blames the AI. This isn’t a fringe story anymore. A devastating Guardian investigation published this weekend — combined with a new study from Aarhus University and OpenAI’s own quiet admission that ChatGPT causes psychiatric harm — has thrust “chatbot psychosis” into the center of one of the most urgent conversations in tech. ...